The Space Race was the last great era in human
exploration. Space programs had the backing of the public, its
participants were adored, and governments saw them as a source of pride
(rather than the burden that the government treats them as today).

With America and the Soviet Union in a race to reach
the skies and a landing on the lunar surface only a few years away, both
superpowers were looking farther into the night sky for the next step.

They saw Venus.

After the moon, Venus is the brightest object in the
night sky. Named after the goddess of beauty, she is approximately
the same size of Earth and has often been called Earth's twin.

The similarity pretty much ends there. The
Venusian atmosphere is 96.5 percent carbon dioxide with pressure 92 times
that of Earth. The surface temperature is a balmy 480 degrees
centigrade (894 degrees Fahrenheit) under the intense flashes of lightning
and rain showers of sulphuric acid.

Obviously, landing on Venus would mean death in the
most spectacular and nasty way possible, but a flyby of the inhospitable
world was tempting to both NASA and the Soviets Space Agency who both
conceived what would have been a long and ambitious mission.

Using equipment created and perfected from the Apollo
program, the NASA mission would have launched on October 31, 1973 and
passed by Venus on March 3, 1974 and returned to Earth by December 1st.

With a mission that would last well over a year, the
lunar orbiter would have been far too small to sustain the astronauts on
the trip to Venus and back, therefore NASA was prepared to build a command
module "workshop" similar to what was built on the Skylab station.
An unusual feature of this design was that the astronauts would be
required to sit backwards -- in a way that the thrust of the launch would
push them out of their seats rather than into them.

The Soviet plan, if successful, would have launched
even earlier and been even more ambitious. Their space craft, called
Tyazhely Mezhplanetny Korabl or TMK-1, would have left Earth on
June 8, 1971 and embarked on a three-year mission to fly by Mars.

Unfortunately, after NASA put Apollo 8 on the moon,
public clamor for space travel waned as did government ambition and the
support that the space agencies once enjoyed were replaced by budgetary
concerned and bureaucratic cowardice. While it was a long shot that
these missions would have ever actually launched, once cannot help but
wonder what these missions would have been like or where they might have
taken us.